"And open to all of us," added Seth. "We never had any dispute with the Englishman who owned Haig's ranch before him, and he got fair treatment, though he wasn't here much of the time to look after it. We heard he had some family trouble, and one day when he'd been gone a long time--" "That's four years now," interrupted Claire. "Yes. Haig showed up, and said the ranch was his. He started in straight off to hog the whole thing. Bought a thousand head of cattle--that made thirteen hundred head--almost as many as all the rest of us had put together. He turned the thirteen hundred into the open range, and hired men to keep them moving the right way for the good feed, and--" "He had a perfect right to do that, you see," Claire put in hastily. "Legal right, maybe," Huntington went on. "But he didn't have any real right to more than his share. We organized, bunched our cattle, and stayed with 'em. That way we were stronger than he, and soon had his cattle starving. Then he disappeared, and we didn't see anything of him for three weeks. And what do you suppose the damned skunk--" "Seth!" cried Claire warningly, with an anxious look at Marion. Marion merely shook her head. "Well, he fooled us. He went to Denver, got a lawyer on the job, looked up the records, found there'd been a mistake in the surveys, and came back to us with a government deed to almost half the forest reserve that we'd been using as free pasture. Then he ordered us off, and we went, with six Winchesters pointed at our fool backs. What do you think of that, Marion?" "But why?" asked Marion. "I mean what was his motive in all that? He isn't a cattleman. I mean--I don't think he cares enough--" She stopped, finding herself in dangerous waters. "Why? Because he's a--" Huntington checked himself. "Anyhow, he barely escaped a lynching that night. And if he only knew it, I'm the one that stopped it. I said we'd find some other way. But we haven't found it. We had to bring most of our stock down to the pastures we needed for winter, and in winter we had to buy hay at eighteen dollars a ton. And Haig had hay to sell. Three of our men were driven out of business. Tom Jenkins, being dead broke and discouraged, with a family, killed himself. I had to sell off a third of my cattle, and twenty head disappeared, and I never saw them again. And maybe you can understand now how I felt when I saw him this evening, standing there in my own house, grinning at me. God!" He turned, grabbed up the poker, and began jabbing viciously at the fire.